Super Happy Fun in trouble (again)?

[yendi]

Just received the following email from the Super Happy Fun mailing list:




from cinemart_temp <cinemart_temp@yahoo.com> hide details Apr 22 (14 hours ago)
reply-to super_happy_fun-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
to super_happy_fun@yahoogroups.com
date Apr 22, 2007 5:52 PM
subject [super_happy_fun] A Threat from Japanese New Wave dot com
mailed-by returns.groups.yahoo.com


Got this nice letter today from the guy that used to run
JapanesNewWave.com, charlie trax.

>>Sorry, but I don't have the time for games:
Attached is the Engish version of a Japanese letter.
The letter plus CD-ROM and additional material will be in the mailbox
on Wednesday morning, if the website isn't down.<<

-----------------------------------------------

April 25, 2007

Motion Pictures Copyrights Department
JASRAC
3-6-12 Uehara
Shibuya-ku
Tokyo
151-8540 Japan

Junichi Shinsaka
Secretary General
Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan, Inc.

Takeshi Inagaki
Secretary General
Association of All Japan TV Program Production Companies (ATP)

Dear Sirs,

We would like to direct your attention to this US-American website,
where the most severe copyright infringements concerning virtually
every Japanese DVD production company takes place.

http://www.superhappyfun.com

Attached is a CD-ROM which contains a list of 338 titles which are
protected under Japanese copyright laws, cloned copies of which are
illegally sold through the above mentioned website. Every entry in
this list provides two links, one leading to the US website' s entry
of the title, and the other to the Japanese original DVD as it is sold
in Japan.
As an evidence, that these titles are illegal DVD-R clones of Japanese
original DVDs, we attach 2 DVD-R versions, which we've baught through
the SuperHappyFun website, and add the Japanese original versions for
comparison.
In addition we attach the envelope, in which the illegal DVD-R copies
were delivered. It contains the address of the illegal DVD-R factory,
which is manufacturing the replicas.

The owner of this website is

>>MY HOME ADDRESS<<

The service provider, legally responsible for the hosting of this
website is Network Solutions. Your copyright complaints can be
directed to the legal department of Network Solutions:

Service Provider: Network Solutions, LLC

Designated Agent: Linda L. Larsen

Address to Which Notification Should Be Sent:

3861 Sunrise Valley Drive, Herndon, Va 20171

Telephone Number: 1-703-668-5615

Facsimile Number: 1-703-668-5959

E-Mail: dmca@networksolutions.com
For we are not familiar with the complicated intricacies of all
Japanese associations dealing with the protection of copyright laws,
we'd like to politely ask you to hand out this letter plus the CD-ROM
list to other Japanese institutions concerned with copyright
infringements.

Yours sincerely

Dr. Naoko Kawashita

JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow
Nagoya University
406, 2-11-1 shinsei
491-0912, Ichinomiya-shi, Aichi-ken
Japan

Appendix:

1. CD-ROM with 38 pages list of copyright infringements in English and
Japanese
2. 2 DVD-Rs containing clones of Japanese DVDs
3. 2 original Japanese DVDs
4. Japanese version of this letter


For those not aware, Super Happy Fun is one of the better sites operating in the grey area of movie copyright law, distributing DVD copies of movies that are not only not available in the US, but for which no US company owns the rights. Which doesn't make it legal, per se (and please do not for a second mistake me for an expert on international copyright law; at best, I've got some good knowledge of academic fair use laws), but doesn't exactly make them the same as the guy on Times Square selling a camcorded copy of Blades of Glory, either.


Now, I'm not sure the DMCA actually allows what the guy in question is asking, but I'm also pretty sure that, as the recent Australian YouTube case proved, any DMCA threat is enough to get items removed from a site. I'm not sure of the history of the people involved (the url for Japanese New Wave now points to Super Happy Fun's site), but there's no question this is petty and malicious.

I'm not going to defend what SHF does on legal grounds, but I'll note that without them, the DVDs they sell wouldn't be easily available here. The potential to lose one of the best sources of out-of-print movies is huge.

Comments

[robyn-ma.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that bites. I have to wonder, though, why SHF has attracted so much of this kind of attention while the dozens of other grey-market sites haven't.

I think partly it's that they deal a lot of foreign stuff that is legitimately available if you've got an all-region, all-code player. (Which isn't expensive at all these days.) Other companies do flicks that haven't been released anywhere else.

SHF is also the only such site I can think of that has a password-protected area where they sell the stuff that might really get them in deep shit, like the pre-Special Edition versions of the Star Wars OT (before Lucas finally consented to put them out legitimately last winter).

[yendi]

*nod* Good points. I also don't know what's going on in terms of personal history here; it definitely sounds like there are issues we're not seeing.

[robyn-ma.livejournal.com]

If they carry something you want, now's the time to snag it.

[lovingboth]

'All titles are believed to be in the public domain'?!? What crap.

I can see that '... are believed not to be commercially available in the US at the moment' might be true, but they're still selling other people's stuff without permission.

[robyn-ma.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Granted, they have a lot of cool stuff for a lot cheaper than you'd pay at, say, hkflix.com. But like I said to the Yendster above, I go to a whole lot of rare-movie sites and SHF is the one that really seems to be pushing the definition of what they can sell. Then again, the grey market in general likes to yelp 'Berne Act! Berne Act!' whenever possible, but I found this on a forum:

No such Act exists, nor any act of Congress that remotely resembles it. The Berne Convention is a multinational treaty. It doesn't allow for the unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted foreign films. It doesn't allow for the unauthorized copying and distribution of otherwise unavailable copyrighted films. It does nothing of the sort. Unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted imported films is illegal in the United States. Unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted unavailable films is illegal in the United States.

Bootleggers often refer to the Berne Convention (or some invented Berne Act) to defend their practices. It's just made up. They just picked something copyright-related out of thin air and invented a non-existent legal premise to go with it.

The closest thing that exists to the legal premise you posit is 17 USC § 602(a), in the US Copyright Act, which allows for the importation of foreign-made copies of copyrighted works in 3 limited circumstances: government importation, educational/religious importation, and "for the private use of the importer and not for distribution, by any person with respect to no more than one copy or phonorecord of any one work at any one time, or by any person arriving from outside the United States with respect to copies or phonorecords forming part of such person’s personal baggage." The last one is the one most helpful to purchasers of imported DVDs, but it doesn't cover what Midnight Video and its ilk do. They are making and distributing copies of films, not simply importing single copies of authorized DVDs acquired abroad for personal use.

Unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted films is illegal in the United States, no matter the county of origin. There is no "Berne Act" or "Byrne Act" or anything else which states otherwise. It really is a shame to see people so willingly accept silly bootleggers' myths.

[bassfingers.livejournal.com]

Indeed the Berne Convention essentially states that if if something has copyright in a country that was part of the Berne Convention (including Japan) that other countries in the Berne Convention (including the US) will respect and honor those copyrights.

[lovingboth]

Yep, which is why the US finally signing the thing, after years of - as everyone else saw it - pirating other people's work if they'd had the nerve to publish it elsewhere first.

The Hollywood studios need to be reminded that they were founded on piracy (both of Edison's patents and of 'foreign' intellectual property) more often.

[yendi]

There's no Byrne act either? Dammit. I figured that was the one that declared that everyone is an asshole.

[chris-walsh.livejournal.com]

Nice.

[bassfingers.livejournal.com]

Heh. If what they're saying was even remotely true, how can they justify this one?

Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years
Spheeris, Penelope, 1988, USA

or anything else that they sell that was either produced or first released in the USA?

[yendi]

True. Although the water gets even muddier when you realize that it's perfectly possible (for certain works) for something to be public domain and still very much not making money for the creator (see George Romero and Night of the Living Dead). But yeah, they're going a lot further than the typical anime bootleg dealer at a con with their rationalization.

[lovingboth]

Ah the quirks of old US copyright law.

Selling grey imports - fine, even Amazon does it.

Selling pirated copies, with the excuse that no-one's selling the real things - not fine.

I'm amazed they've lasted this long, to be honest.

[robyn-ma.livejournal.com]

Throw a stick and you'll hit 20 similar sites that hide behind the nonexistent Berne Act. (They also say they're only charging for the materials and time, not for the movies themselves.) They just basically stay under the radar, is all. Usually the copyright owner sends a letter demanding that the website remove the disputed titles, the website owner (if s/he is smart) complies, and that's that. Usually these things don't go to court.

The other thing is that these websites can't possibly be making crazy money at this. How many people are gonna order Gimme Gimme Octopus? And increasingly they're not doing business through PayPal because they don't want to have to answer uncomfortable questions.

If you're patient enough, everything shows up on legit DVD eventually anyway. I've found that out the hard way in my bootleg-buying adventures.

[yendi]

If you're patient enough, everything shows up on legit DVD eventually anyway. I've found that out the hard way in my bootleg-buying adventures.


*sigh* I can only hope. If anything deserves a special edition, it's the complete run of Supertrain.